Hmmmm... It's a Mystery!

Oooh - Everyone loves a good mystery.  And this one is GREAT!  

As a child, I spent a lot of time reading realistic fiction (mostly Sweet Valley Twins,  which is funny considering how much twins freak me out).  It wasn't until library school when I read my first real mystery.  Yeah, I'd been forced to read mysteries in middle school, I am sure... I DID read The Westing Game, after all... but I had never picked one up out of my own volition.  I didn't even read The Boxcar Children, a childhood staple in most lives.  Perhaps it has something to do with how big of a baby I am and how I avoid suspense like it is the plague (I can't even play hide-and-go-seek for fear I pee my pants in anxious terror), but mysteries just never had much appeal.

Enter the aforementioned Shakespeare's Secret.  Perhaps it is that in children's mysteries, the suspense is minimal, or that it only lasts for a few pages, but I loved it.  It was awhile until I picked up another mystery, but I definitely wasn't disappointed in picking up the first in The Red Blazer Girls series, The Ring of Rocamadour.  

As the audiobook selector, I had a conversation about this particular series a few months back.  We owned several of the audiobooks, but not the actual books.  In our collection development policy, if we don't own the physical book, we shouldn't own the audio... so I had to convince our YA selector to purchase the copies or get rid of the audiobooks.  After a 15-20 minute discussion, we decided to keep them and purchase the whole set.  I am SO glad we did (and so is she).

I don't know if it is because they had to use their brains to solve the mystery or because they were the most sarcastic middle school girls I have ever read about, but I felt as if I would have been friends with them when I was younger.  I found myself immediately living with them in their city dwellings, fretting over school-girl crushes, and enjoying the 'Catholic humor' and adventure that ensued.  

As soon as I put the audiobook on in my car, I recognized the narrator as the same one from a different book I had listened to, which always excites me.  I enjoyed the book so much, I also checked out the physical book so that I could be reading it at home, on lunch, before bed, and then listen to it in the car.  I would definitely recommend it to any parent looking for a fun 'girl book' for their daughter that isn't too mature and has just the right amount of 'sass'.

As my coworker says, now we just have to get recommending it to the right kids!

I'll Be Seeing You....

As I have been recently avoiding books that make me cry, I was surprised when the book, See You at Harry's was recommended to me and I jumped at the chance to read it.  I was even warned.... this will be sad.  

I felt confident.  It has been a long time since I really had a breakdown.  I have been dealing with my life pretty well, and I even read a book about a widowed woman and laughed through the 300-some pages of her experience.  They say that humor is a more intelligent way to deal with grief.  If that is true, I am the smartest person alive.  As Chandler on Friends would say, "I'm not so good with the advice, can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?"

When this particular book was recommended as a 'most wonderful story', I took it home and spent the following nights engrossed in its pages.  It truly is a great story, and one that I didn't want to put down, but I spent the entire book much like I did while reading The Help.... with a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.  As I was warned that it was a sad story, I knew that something bad would happen... I just didn't know what.   That might have made it worse.  It sounds bad to say, but I was expecting an awful outcome... and what happened was just short of that.

At one point, I returned to the person who recommended the book in the first place to check with her as to what was about to happen.  As someone who often turns to the end of novels to read the last chapter to keep anxiety at bay, I was very nervous.  She wouldn't tell me what happened (very nice of her), but she did assure me that everything would turn out 'ok-ish'.

When bad things happen, it is sometimes children who get left behind and neglected. This isn't the first book I have read where something bad happens and a child is basically ignored while their parents get a grip on things.  While I would like to say that these types of books aren't accurate and don't portray what actually happens when tragedy strikes, I unfortunately know that they are.

As with Captain Nobody by Dean Pitchford, another of this type of realistic fiction books that deal with family tragedy and children's coping skills, See You at Harry's gives an accurate portrayal of a family in grief.  When tragedy struck my own family, I watched as my aunt and uncle went through the heartbreak of losing their child and were so caught up in their own grief they left my cousins to fend for themselves.  I guess the other children are a casualty of the tragedy as well.  

Hopefully, this type of books provide comfort to grieving families and to the children left in them.  Perhaps if they read these novels, they feel as if what their family is going through is normal, which is half the battle in grief.... knowing that they aren't alone.  How unfortunate.